Priscilla Presley went shopping all over Beverly Hills for antiques. She was decorating a house for her husband while he was out on tour.
She did the game room in suede and filled it with pinball machines and a pool table. The kitchen was country style, with a wicker breakfast nook. Elvis got a den, and that ended up being her favorite room.
“I did it the way he wanted it,” she told Ladies’ Home Journal in 1973. “Antiques, very manly.”
The house sat at 144 Monovale Drive, on a corner in Holmby Hills, a wealthy and fairly private pocket of Los Angeles. Elvis bought it in December 1970 for $339,000.
It was a Tudor-style mansion built in 1937, with seven bedrooms on about 1.6 acres. Movie star Robert Montgomery had lived there in the late 1930s.
Elvis already owned a home in nearby Beverly Hills. He’d bought it in 1967, the year he married Priscilla, and their daughter Lisa Marie came along the next February.
But Los Angeles felt different after August 1969. That summer, followers of Charles Manson murdered actress Sharon Tate and four others at a house not far away. One account says Elvis wanted a bigger, safer place for his wife and little girl, with a high fence all the way around.
So the Presleys moved to Monovale while Lisa Marie was still a toddler. Elvis poured money into fixing the place up in 1971.
From the street, it probably looked like a happy family home. The marriage inside it was coming apart, though. Elvis was away for long stretches, playing Las Vegas and touring, and Priscilla later said her whole life revolved around him.
On February 23, 1972, they separated. Priscilla walked out of the life she’d lived since she was a teenager.
Decades later, she sat down to talk about the life she built after she left.
Inside Priscilla Presley’s Life After Elvis
“I didn’t leave him because I didn’t love him,” she told CBS. “I just couldn’t live the life.”
The story of the house after that depends on who’s telling it. Some reports say Priscilla and Lisa Marie stayed on at Monovale for a while. The 1973 magazine story said Elvis was living there alone, while Priscilla and Lisa Marie had a five-room penthouse apartment near the ocean.
The divorce became final on October 9, 1973, at a courthouse in Santa Monica. A photographer that day said they walked out arm in arm, “smiling and smooching.”
They agreed to share custody of Lisa Marie. Part of the settlement gave Priscilla half the money from selling their Beverly Hills home.
Elvis stayed close to his little girl. He’d call her often from the road, and when he was in town, he saw her a lot.
In 1975, he sold Monovale, reportedly for $625,000. Several accounts say the buyer was actor Telly Savalas, the bald detective from TV’s Kojak.
Nearly 50 years later, in 2020, it sold for $20 million, and a lot next door went for another $9.3 million. The new owners were fashion designer Jasmin Larian and Ryan Hekmat. The agents had pitched it as a chance to rebuild.
Priscilla still gets asked about Elvis all the time. When someone asked why neither of them ever married again, she just laughed.
“We couldn’t find anyone else!”